One or more aspects relate, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to improving such processing.
Applications executing within a processor of a computing environment control the behavior of the processor. The applications are created using programming languages which are designed to communicate instructions to the processor.
There are various types of programming languages, and each language may use one or more types of encodings to represent data. For example, COBOL and PL/I programming languages use binary coded decimal (BCD) to encode decimal numbers. With BCD encodings, each decimal digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, such as 4 bits, in one example.
Decimal numbers may contain up to 31 digits, as well as a sign digit. This represents a 16-byte value in memory. Many computations are performed using small constants. To load a constant into a register, it is loaded from memory. Because of this, instruction latency is incurred, memory bandwidth is used, and data sizes within binary executables are increased.